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Who Owns Our Ancestors Voices? Tribal Claims To Pre-72 Sound Recordings, Trevor Reed
Who Owns Our Ancestors Voices? Tribal Claims To Pre-72 Sound Recordings, Trevor Reed
Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts
A familiar story is told in Indian Country: a researcher arrives on a Native American reservation and begins recording ceremonial songs and oral histories; years later tribal members find, often to their horror, that these sensitive materials are available for sale, download, or streaming to the public. This scenario aptly describes the life of numerous sound recordings made on federally recognized Indian reservations prior to 1972, whose ownership status remains uninterrogated due to the complex overlap and ambiguities of copyright and federal Indian law. Yet recently, owing to an increased sense of self-determination and autonomy, Native American tribes have begun …
The Immanent Rationality Of Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Immanent Rationality Of Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Why does copyright treat certain kinds of copying as legally actionable? For nearly a century, American copyright thinking has referenced a core consequentialist dogma to answer this question: incentivizing the production of creative expression at minimal social cost in an effort to further social welfare. This rationale, routinely traced back to the Constitution’s seemingly utilitarian mandate that copyright law should “promote the [p]rogress” of the sciences and useful arts, has come to dominate modern copyright jurisprudence and analysis.2 By classifying specific acts of copying as a wrong, and thereby recognizing a “right to the use of one’s expression,” copyright is …